Tag Archives: publishing

Storytelling is a tradition that will exist as long as humans inhabit the Earth. It’s in our DNA. The tools we use, however, have changed and will continue to change. We’ve moved on from cave paintings to the written word, from parchment paper to word processors. We’ve even seen the printed word slowly disappear as we move on to electronic readers, like the Kindle and Nook, which allow users to store hundreds of books on a single device.

Another monumental change has occurred just in the past 20 months or so. With the introduction of the iPad and other tablet devices that followed shortly thereafter, readers are able to dive deeper into content than ever before. So it’s no surprise that when Razorfish chairman Clark Kokich wanted to write a book, he decided that the only appropriate way to do so was to bypass traditional publishers and create it as an interactive application. See the demo below.

After three years of charting the emerging Post-Advertising world right here with you guys, we decided to throw our very own real world event: The Post-Advertising Summit! (March 29th, at New York’s Cult Studios. Details here). In other words, we're throwing a party...and you're all invited!

As just about anyone with internet access is now painfully aware, this week the New York Times imposed a “paywall” on visitors who want to read more than 20 articles per month. In other words, the newspaper is trying to leap from “basic cable” to “premium cable,” apparently without making any changes to its content or even going commercial-free. The big question is: Will it work?

Remember when the iPad was set to revolutionize, reinvigorate, and single-handedly save the publishing world? Just a scant four months ago magazines, under the spell of this magical thinking, began importing their rags onto the iPad only to sit back and wait for salvation. Well, as we all know, pasting pre-existing pages into a scrollable touch format hasn’t saved anyone’s keister. But with time, publishers are catching on—the latest round of magazines gone digital offer hope that this industry can regain its footing amid instant publishing and consumer-generated content. We run down our newest favorites after the jump...

Business Insider columnist Steve Rosenbaum recently riffed at length about the changing nature of the media game. Here's the gist: Our old media overlords are out and anyone and everyone is in. The new demand is for people and platforms that make sense of the online cacophony. Cue the culture of the curator.

The metamorphosis of brands into fully realized media companies — that is, providers of real, quality content — is something we like to talk about a lot at Post Advertising. And we're thrilled to see it take hold. In particular, Tom Foremski, purveyor of the newly-launched EC=MC discusses many of the same concepts. Think Einstein would've agreed with us?

The Atlantic's June cover story lavishes praise on Google, pointing to the search giant as the woeful news industry’s surefire ticket back to profitability. This is a nice idea—one that helps us all sleep a little better at night—but in reality, Google doesn't have any concrete solutions yet. Rather, author's optimism springs from a general feeling he got from interviewing Google execs. They seems to really care about the news. According to a piece by our very own Kirk Cheyfitz (CEO here at Story) published over at Huffington Post, Google has actually done little to help foster the meaningful, dynamic, and entertaining ad content that can support quality journalism. With a monopoly on search, they're engorged by stale, old-world web advertising. Is Google here to help?

[NOTE: This post by Story's Kirk Cheyfitz first appeared on the Media page of Huffington Post.]
There's been much crowing by traditional publishers about how the iPad will save books and magazines. But the content we've seen so far won't save anything because it fails to re-imagine books and magazines for iPad-like devices.

RFPs may suck, as Tom Searcy's new book proclaims, but Story Worldwide was recently asked in an RFP to write down Story's "vision for the future of social media" and I thought it was a really good question. Where exactly is all this going? What does it mean? Here's our take:
Story’s vision is that “social media” soon will be called just plain “media” and the world will accept that the power to publish or broadcast to large audiences has passed irrevocably from a select few to virtually everyone. It is common wisdom these days that marketers no longer own their brands; the audience does. It’s critical to understand that this is true because marketers are no longer the masters of communicating about their brands; social networks have given that power to everyone. This profoundly game-changing democratization of mass communications is going to accelerate. One day soon, social media will trump the power of traditional media, meaning that national newspapers, network TV and brand advertisers will become, in effect, just another voice in the crowd. On that day, brands without a credible presence on social networks will cease to be competitive.